Restoring Degraded Lands

Abstract

Land degradation continues to be an enormous challenge to human societies, reducing food security, emitting greenhouse gases and aerosols, driving the loss of biodiversity, polluting water, and undermining a wide range of ecosystem services beyond food supply and water and climate regulation. Climate change will exacerbate several degradation processes. Investment in diverse restoration efforts, including sustainable agricultural and forest land management, as well as land set aside for conservation wherever possible, will generate co-benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation and morebroadly for human and societal well-being and the economy. This review highlights the magnitude of the degradation problem and some of the key challenges for ecological restoration. There are biophysical as well as societal limits to restoration. Better integrating policies to jointly address poverty, land degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions and removals is fundamental to reducing many existing barriers and contributing to climate-resilient sustainable development.

High energy and fertilizer prices are more damaging than food export curtailment from Ukraine and Russia for food prices, health and the environment

“…Set against these negative environmental impacts, higher fertiliser costs would lead to reductions in nitrogen use that could have environmental benefits for air and water quality (e.g., reducing eutrophication). However, increasing the use of irrigation water would also lead to further pressures on scarce water resources in arid and semi-arid regions 33 .…”

Identifying uncertainties in scenarios and models of socio-ecological systems in support of decision-making

“…201 This is critical in better evaluating the considerable role of humans in causing ecological degradation, and in informing the decision processes that can do something about it through restoration and effective ecosystem management. 202 Within this review, we have focused on models and scenarios of socio-ecological systems. However, it is clear from the literature that there is a bias toward the ''ecological'' aspects rather than the ''social'' aspects of such systems, such that many modeling approaches do not adequately capture the full range of interacting human and natural processes.…”

Actions to halt biodiversity loss generally benefit the climate

“…On land, vegetation and soils in most natural ecosystems store more carbon than systems managed for agriculture, forestry or grasslands. Rewilding is, therefore, considered a potentially important contribution to climate change mitigation, since the regrowing plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing this carbon in biomass and soils (Arneth et al, 2021 ; Smith et al, 2020 ; Strassburg et al, 2020 ). Rewilding, however, often also means trophic rewilding such as the reintroduction of large mammal herbivores or carnivores into ecosystems, supporting overall restoration efforts by rebuilding trophic cascades and promoting system self‐regulation (Bakker & Svenning, 2018 ; Sandom et al, 2020 ).…”